Primrose Road

Too long have traditionalists been given free reign to study Shakespeare's corpus under the a priori assumption that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford were actually written by him. In this essay, I challenge those traditionalists, supplying incontrovertible proof -- since we all know that Shakespeare scholars love incontrovertible proof -- that Shakespeare's plays were actually authored by Ralph L., a hospital administrator born in New York in 1943.

It is quite obvious to anyone with an open mind and Internet connection that William Shakespeare did not author the plays attributed to him. First, there is a notable lack of documents related to the supposed glovemaker's son-turned-playwright from Stratford: all we have are baptismal records, a marriage license, will, documents concerning his buying and selling of property, actors' lists, audience reports, several years' worth of the Lord Chamberlain's records, five signatures, and an inventory of the Globe theatre. And Shakespeare of Stratford's will makes no reference to his career as a playwright, as long as we ignore, for the sake of free inquiry, its references to Heminge, Condell, Burbage, and the Blackfriars' theatre. Take note, traditionalists: there is a definitive lack of documents. (My most recent Google search tells me that Shakespeare scholars like the word "lack"; I hope this argument appeals to them.) Those of us willing to make radical departures from the traditionalist viewpoint are able to posit new and exciting answers to the highly relevant question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

I begin with three pieces of evidence that Shakespeare's plays were authored by Ralph L.: (1) the events in Romeo and Juliet loosely correspond to events that Ralph would have witnessed in his own household; (2) the recently discovered evidence that Shakespeare was Jewish would make Ralph the most likely candidate for the position of Shakespeare; and (3) contemporary playwrights (more on how we will have to rethink our definition of "contemporary" later) like Francis Beaumont and the Arden of Faversham author make deeply encoded references to the open secret of Ralph's authorship.

As a teeanger, Ralph would have witnessed the courtship of his sister by his future brother-in-law, a trucker who worked for their father yet was not welcome in their apartment. The couple married in spite of Ralph's father's and older brothers' objections. This incident obviously inspired Romeo and Juliet; Ralph seems to have appended a tragic ending only after an incident in which his nose was accidentally broken during a baseball game.

Also telling is the fact that Ralph and "Shakespeare" held the same body of knowledge about the country in which Romeo and Juliet is set. Even some traditionalists admit that Shakespeare is often mistaken about Italian geography. (As my playwriting teacher at the 'OMG I Wanna Be a Writer Magazine' School of Writing Certificates has said many times, "If you want to write plays, you have to know geography, or they'll tear you apart. 97% of bad reviews are geography-related.") Ralph's knowledge of Italian geography is as follows: "Italy is shaped like a boot." [Personal interview with Ralph L., 7/31/07, Ralph L.'s living room].

Gene Gordon, who astutely posits that Shakespeare was an atheist, a kabbalist, and G-d, also makes the argument that because Moses, Jesus, Marx, Einstein, and Freud were Jewish, and they are considered the five greatest thinkers of the Western world, then Shakespeare, too, must have been a Jew. Ralph L., bar-mitzvahed in 1956, is thus our best candidate for "Shakespeare," save for, of course, G-d. But because no events in G-d's life resemble the plot of Romeo and Juliet, we have to award the title of "Shakespeare" to Ralph. (Sorry, gee-dash-dee.)

Our final piece of evidence lies with "Shakespeare"'s fellow playwrights, who regularly made wink-wink-nudge-nudge references to Ralph's authorship. Beaumont, for example, names the title character of his Knight of the Burning Pestle Rafe. The character Rafe, who is the serving-man of a grocer's wife, takes on the role of a knight on stage. And as we all know from Ralph Fiennes (aka Voldemort), "Rafe" is English for Ralph. It's an obvious reference, and I am not sure why traditionalists would read it any other way. The Arden of Faversham author -- who may even be Ralph himself -- names "Flushing" in the play's epilogue, an obvious reference to Flushing, Queens in a play that names two characters "Black Will" and "Shakebag." It is as if the author wanted to say that William Shakespeare was not who we thought he was, and that he was actually from Flushing, Queens. Traditionalists, of course, will contend that "Flushing" here refers to the town in the Netherlands to which several men involved in the plot to kill the historical Thomas Arden escaped. But traditionalists are obsessed with context; their view is more often than not limited by their myopia, refusal to acknowledge paradigm shifts, and, of course, their traditionalism.

Now that we have established that William Shakespeare of Stratford is actually Ralph L. of Flushing, we must redate all of the plays, which up until this point were assumed to have been written between 1592 and 1611. Romeo and Juliet, for example, was most likely written in the late 1950s, based on the biographical evidence already presented in this essay. The project of redating the plays is the focus of my forthcoming monograph Against Traditionalism: Shakespeare Is My Dad (AuthorVanityMill Press, 2007, $42.95).

Nitpicky traditionalists may ask how I explain stage and film productions that predate Ralph's birth; naturally, I have an answer. (I have all the answers.) If traditional academics can make the claim that "Shakespeare" adapted his plays from previous works -- Hamlet from Belleforest and Saxo Grammaticus, Macbeth and King Lear from Holinshed's Chronicles, The Merchant of Venice from the Gesta Romanorum, etc. -- who is to say that the film versions of the plays could not have preceded Ralph/Shakespeare's? In fact, as I argue in my monograph, Much Ado About Nothing, previously thought to have been written around 1598, may have actually been written as late as 1995, when Ralph reportedly caught Kenneth Branagh's film of the same name on HBO while flipping through channels looking for that day's Mets game.

In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that Ralph L. is my father. However, I assure you, dear reader, that I stand to gain nothing from this argument except for the respect of those folks brave enough to wear their "Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare" T-shirts in public.